Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday April 11, 2013 @04:16PM
from the no-wireless-less-space-than-a-nomad-lame dept.

bdking writes "Google says it plans to ship its Google Glass Explorer Edition by the end of April to developers and consumers who paid $1,500 to test the computer-enabled eyewear, with vague plans for a general release (at a lower price) by year's end. But what will you really be able to do with Google Glass, beyond having information presented before your eyes? Even investors who are set to spend millions funding apps development for Google Glass have no clue. Is Google Glass being overhyped as a 'transformational' device?" I bet every real estate agent in the world would like one of these hooked up to a database of houses for sale, so they could instantly scan all the relevant information.

Google Glass doesn't just present information; it can record, too. And if you record every little thing you see, it's possible to review and discover small, but critically important events later. For example, one of my college instructors has a child with autism. Video from his child's second birthday party helped make the diagnosis, but more and earlier footage would have helped diagnose it sooner. If my instructor had been wearing and recording with Google Glass every time he saw or watched his child, he would have had a wealth of material for evaluation and diagnosis.

As a DIY kinda guy who does his own auto maintenance, fixes stuff around his house, cooks, assembles toys for his kid, etc, the immediate thing that would absolutely make me buy one of these is just the ability to present instructions in front of my face without me having to look away from what I'm doing.

How many times have I been looking at my engine and gotten lost thinking, "Wait, was that bolt on the left side or the right side?" and had to stop and reach for the manual or the instructions I had loaded up on my tablet. Or been holding three pieces of baby furniture together with one hand while rummaging through my tool belt to get the right screws and then realized "crap, does this part take the long screw or the medium long screw?" and had to put the whole thing back down to reach for the instructions. If I had a hands-free display showing me the instructions it would be way easier.

And the instructions don't even need to be digitized already and downloaded from the manufacturer's website. Glass has a camera, so before I get started, look at the instructions and snap a few high-res pics.

Eventually, if such devices penetrate the market there might be a reason to use those QR codes. Companies could put out "Glass Enabled Instructions" where each part has a small code on it, so when you get to "Insert Rod A into Flange B" the instructions app would scan your visual field for the correct marker code on Rod A and give you a thumbs up. Which gives you all kinds of other applications for general education and training.

Also, whenever I'm taking something apart, I find myself grabbing my phone to snap pictures during the disassembly, so when it comes time to stick all the color-coded but otherwise unmarked wires back into the posts on the PCB I have a quick reference for what it looked like when I started. With Glass, fuck, not only could I take stills without rummaging for my phone, I could just record a video of the whole process and then scrub back through it if I was unsure of how anything fit together during reassembly.

Your mentality is that of an Apple consumer, not that of an inventor. You tell the corporations "tell me how I should use your product". My crowd tells them "show me what your product does, I'll decide if I have a use for it". In my world, iPads are complete crap - they're an appliance for Grandma that I can't connect my 1-wire scanner to, because it doesn't even have a USB port. On the other hand, an Arduino or cheap 3-D printer is a godsend. Google Glass is meant for me, not for you.

As soon as Glass hits a good price point and works with QR codes, that's my next inventory solution. Put on your glasses and look at the QR code on a server, get a readout of what it is and who the point of contact is. Oh wait, your glasses just popped up the status from the SQL database "DO NOT POWER DOWN, LARGE UPDATE IN PROGRESS". Or when maintenance looks at the QR code on an HVAC controller, it pops up the web page to access it.

You have no imagination, that's why you don't understand that this is just the first step to the rig in "Virtual Light" (fingers eagerly crossed). It has been so long since a large company did innovation for the sake of innovation, that nowadays it's an alien concept.

Not an accelerometer -- that doesn't have anything to do with heading. For wearable heading you have two options: a full 6 degree-of-freedom inertial platform, or a magnetometer. Well, there's a third option - phase-differential GPS, but that only works outdoors, with no tall buildings around, and it would be the most expensive to develop as they'd need it done custom as none of the off-the-shelf "tiny" modules support anything like it. You really need to feed input from two antennas, separated by a known distance, to the receiver, and compare the phase of the incoming signals to determine which way the baseline is pointing. For wearable heading, a magnetometer is pretty much "it". Oh, and it tends to have problems when you're on the boundary to large steel structures. In a high rise building, you'd be OK when inside, but would face lower accuracy near the walls and when going in/out of the building. And so on.

One word: advertising. Right in front of your eyes is the most prime advertising space I can imaine.

Bzzt. Wrong target.

Advertising yes, but not to the user. The user is merely a tool to capture the goings on and identities of everyone else. Couple with GPS and other sensors and facial recognition, Google would now have a more complete picture of you.

So if a Glass user catches you walking out of a bar, you can find new Google ads for bars, ladies and other things around that area when you surf the web.

So yes, advertising, but it's putting more effective advertising in front of more people. Glass users will be few, but they'll be able to collect more information about more people than ever before.

Heck, if a Glass user catches you walking out of a porn store, Google can then prompt you if you want to turn off safe search the next time you visit it.